(Post 1 of my 2024 Travelogue)
So, there are a lot of wild chickens in Singapore.
More chickens than the last time I visited. Way more chickens than when I was a regular resident. That was my chief takeaway during my 5-day visit. Not how the city has gone 100% cashless, not the fact that they’re moving the gigantic port (again)…but the chickens.
I woke to rooster crows. I ran into them in hawker centres and under roadside trees. Friends told tales of how a flock of them ran up to the chicken rice stall and started to crow.
Perhaps the news of seven years ago was a portent of these fowl changes. Back in 2017, there was a debacle when 24 wild chickens in the Sin Ming neighbourhood were culled to suit a few angry citizens’ convenience. Our raucous dinosaurs, ever indomitable against the scourge of natural selection, have returned with a vengeance.
Some citizens remember a time when Singapore was a “sleepy backwater” (in government-speak)—a collective of villages and slums where animals roamed in plenty. This was before the great makeover of the 60s to 90s, which eradicated those slums and elevated the city-state into the hallowed metropolis that everyone loves (or despises).
But this shiny façade does not come easy. This is a city eternally at war with the wildlife it claims to love. When I was a child, the AVA undertook a systematic culling of every crow in Singapore—large cage traps filled with crows were a common roadside sight, and indeed, within a year, they were gone. They were an acceptable sacrifice in the name of the governmental master plan.
I reckon if this population boom had happened ten years ago, the government would have wrought the same fate upon the chickens as befell the crows.
But here’s the thing: these birds were here before we were. Before Sir Stamford Raffles bought the island for the King of England in 1819. Before the Srivijaya prince Parameswara founded the Lion City. The Malayan peninsula is the birthplace of the red junglefowl, Gallus gallus, the wild ancestor of all domestic chickens in the world and one of the closest living neognath relatives to the T. Rex.
And it seems that many a Singaporean, lifted out of the slums into this spotless metropolis, still misses the backwater in spirit. Everywhere I looked online, netizens celebrated the birds, whether as pest control, or as reminders of the kampong (village) life.
But these aren’t the birds of the village. The chickens we see today are most likely hybrids between junglefowl and their domesticated descendants—still genetically compatible, despite centuries of divergent breeding—abandoned pets and the wild populace procreating again.
They’re the children of our mottled history, a convergence of nature and artifice. And deep down, deep deep down, perhaps we see ourselves in them.
So yes, there are chickens, despite the best efforts of a loud few. Try as this city does in all its humanity to make nature do its bidding, it cannot—and will not—for we are the ones beholden to it. Long as we want air to breathe, and shade to walk in, there must be trees.
And where there are trees, there will be chickens.
By the way, my latest website project is a chicken breeding petsite. Did I mention that I love chickens?
Leave a Reply